At squeaky bum time (45 minutes) nobody would’ve put Ben Davies down as the guy to rustle up a goal to calm everyone’s heebie-jeebies, screaming abdabs or chronic collywobbles.
Fantastic goal line clearances, yes. Brilliant last-ditch tackle, check. Fifty yard 70mph chase and snaffle, aye.
Goal, no.
MAX, the one-armed Armenian outdoor snooker supremo, was busy honing his skills as we strolled through Yerevan’s Victory Park.
Aged about 45, dressed in a blue shell suit and sporting three days’ bristle on his chin, he was the custodian of a tatty building with rotting timbers. Two pool tables stood on the grimy verandah.
This was Yerevan’s fabled outdoor snooker centre – a shanty town shack that looked ready to fall down.
A hundred yards away on top of a hill overlooking the city, a 100-foot high steel statue of Mother Armenia, surrounded by a tank, missile launcher and other armoured vehicles, stood sentinel over the capital.
Continue reading Outdoor snooker in Yerevan – Armenia 2 Wales 2 (2001)
Crumbling tenements, potholes in all the roads, a delapidated stadium and some of the most lacerating poverty I’ve ever seen. It could only mean one thing. We were in the back of beyond watching the Welsh under-21s again.
The Greatest Fans in the World hired a fleet of taxis for the 20-minute trip to Abovian – that’s Abovian, not Aberfan – to see if our boys could record their first win in howevermany matches it is (someone reckons it’s 16, but, like the u-21 players, none of us particularly care).
Continue reading The Road to Abovian – Armenia 1 Wales 0 (2001)
IN FEBRUARY 2000 the Welsh football team was a shellshocked shitshow that would have given Michael Sheen shingles.
Wales were stranded in a seemingly permanent existential crisis, marooned in terms of self-regard and status – people openly scorned fans as being idiots for going to, say, Moldova, which they had hitherto thought was some type of cheese.
Time was, when the surreal stuff, the weird and wonderfully wacky ways of Welsh fans were the defining characteristic of a trip and indeed, the sole reason for going. Away games were the closest we might get to a journey to Mars or being in a rock band.
I can remember the concierge of Baku’s Hotel Grot, as it should have been called, asking me: “Why your friends throw TV from 16th floor window?” He wouldn’t have understood the answer: “Because they’re from Bala.”
Continue reading Monty Python and the Holy Bale – Macedonia 2 Wales 1
Miles from Nowhere 